Darcy, Patrick

Patrick Darcy (1598–1668) was born into a leading Galway merchant family and laid the foundations of his prominent legal career at the Middle Temple, one of the four Inns of Court that controlled the education of lawyers in England, under the patronage of the earl of Clanricard, who retained his services after he qualified. He played an active role both in the Old English parliamentary opposition to Wentworth's government in 1634 to 1635 and in the resistance to the official program for the confiscation and plantation of lands in Connacht between 1635 and 1637. Though he was disbarred for leaving Ireland without license to deliver a petition to the king, his practice flourished, and his clients included influential members of the nobility and government. He was returned to Parliament in a by-election in May 1641 and at once joined the leadership of the opposition coalition of Old and New English members. When rebellion broke out in October 1641, Darcy remained aloof and cooperated in efforts to preserve neutrality in Galway, but he supported the move to establish an alternative government, was closely involved in drafting the constitution adopted by the Confederate Catholics, as the allied Irish and Old English rebels styled themselves, at Kilkenny in October 1642, and accepted appointment as lord chancellor, the chief legal officer in the rebel administration. Deeply involved in the protracted peace negotiations, Darcy's political behavior became erratic after the king's defeat in England and the failure of the first Ormond peace in the summer of 1646, and his influence declined thereafter.

Darcy lived quietly in Ireland in the 1650s and resumed his practice after Restoration. His contribution to both parliamentary opposition and Confederate ideology was embodied in "An Argument," presented at a conference of Lords and Commons on 9 June 1641, in which he reviewed the legal and constitutional objections of the Commons to developments in the practice of government under Wentworth. In a programmatic analysis of the constituents of legal authority in Ireland, which he identified as the common law of England and the parliamentary statutes and lawful customs of Ireland, he not only stripped the powers traditionally vested in the king of their discretionary character and subordinated them to the law but also excluded English parliamentary authority from Ireland. The essence of his position, that Ireland was a separate kingdom, subject to the same crown as England yet distinct from it, was not novel. However, at a time when the English parliament was taking over royal powers, including the right to rule Ireland, the clarity and force of his statement of the public-law relationship between the English and Irish parliaments was extremely influential. When it was delivered, Darcy's "Argument" expressed the views of Protestant colonists as well as of Catholics. During the Confederate years, when it was published (in 1643) and legislative independence was a Confederate aim, it validated the claim to be loyal to the Crown while fighting in self-defense against Parliament. In later years it became an important source in the case for Irish legislative independence, which was controversially stated by William Molyneux in 1698 and espoused by Protestant "patriots" in the eighteenth century.

SEE ALSO Confederation of Kilkenny; Rinuccini, Giovanni Battista

Bibliography

Clarke, Aidan. "Patrick Darcy and the Constitutional Relationship between Britain and Ireland." In Political Thought in Seventeenth-Century Ireland: Kingdom or Colony, edited by Jane H. Ohlmeyer. 2000.

Darcy, Patrick. "An Argument." In Camden Miscellany, vol. 31, edited by C. E. J. Caldicott. 1992.

O'Malley, Liam. "Patrick Darcy, Galway Lawyer and Politician, 1598–1668." In Galway: Town and Gown, 1484–1984, edited by Diarmuid Ó Cearbhaill. 1984.

Aidan Clarke